The planet is getting skinned. While many worry about the potential consequences of atmospheric warming, a few experts are trying to call attention to another global crisis quietly taking place under our feet. Call it the thin brown line. Dirt. On average, the planet is covered with little more than 3 feet of topsoil — the shallow skin of nutrient-rich matter that sustains most of our food and appears to play a critical role in supporting life on Earth. “We’re losing more and more of it every day,” said David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington. “The estimate is that we are now losing about 1 percent of our topsoil every year to erosion, most of this caused by agriculture.“
Read more: http://www.seattlepi.com/national/article/The-lowdown-on-topsoil-It-s-disappearing-1262214.php#ixzz1qNbm9OKB … this article talks about no-till farming to slow down the loss, but what is needed is not a slowdown but a reversal – we need to build topsoil – quickly, and on a large scale. And one of the few people I know who has a plan to do this is Joel Salatin. He has grown something like 12″ of topsoil in about 40 years on his farm. This article talks about 1-2″ of topsoil being grown naturally over hundreds of years. This is way too slow and the author does not state how this even occurs, so I’m not at all sure it does occur. If we want our great grandkids to have food to eat, we need to implement Joel’s soil building plan soon! Here’s another article from the Telegraph in the UK … http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/agriculture/farming/6828878/Britain-facing-food-crisis-as-worlds-soil-vanishes-in-60-years.html